Category: Music

After the whirlwind of events in the past year, how fitting we should wrap up such a significant portion of our lives in a whirlwind event of a weekend. GWAR-B-Q 2012. We’d spent the better part of almost three months this past year with GWAR. Who woulda thought this little, technically unsigned, management-less project would ever go so far? With just a little heart and a lot of latex, we’d found ourselves amidst brethren we never knew we had. Richmond, VA, is rapidly becoming a second home. And a welcome one at that.

We took a red eye flight on Thursday night. I was schnockered, fitfully downing beer and shots of Maker’s Mark because our flight was delayed. The crew at Jet Blue did us fine, charging us next to nothing for all our guitars and such. The robot and the monkey had headed cheaply a few weeks earlier via Amtrak: much cheaper than posting them. We couldn’t disappoint our godfather’s in GWAR with half a show, not after all we’d been through.

GWAR had been inviting us to GWAR-B-Q for some time. Something I’ve learned is that when GWAR says something is going to happen that seems non-sensical, like going on a second tour, playing GWAR-B-Q, it’s not fantasy: it fucking happens. That kind of veracity and stalwartness are rare these days.

We were picked up from the airport by our friend, merch guy for the last tour, and co-prop master Jim Stramel. He’s the multi-talented Director behind the hit tattoo-murder move, “Degenerates Ink.” and an absolute pushover when it comes to letting us trash his abode in Richmond. Ya gotta love a sucker like that. We crashed, hungover, I mean, jet lagged as shit. It was the day before GWAR-B-Q, so the local dive, Strange Matter, had a BEFORE-B-Q show hosted by Mr. Dave Brockie. Some of us scraped our asses off Jim’s couch and made our way there.

We showed up late, but managed to see our friends George and Kent play in their band Savage Attack. Stripped down Pantera and Slayer worship, the boys let out with a… savage attack. One of my favorite moments was when the vocalist said, “We’re not gonna drop names like Dave Brockie,” except ya just did.

Dethrace from New York were one of the more bizarre things I’ve ever seen, a kaiju inspired… something… band. I guess death metal? Kind of. Drum machines, down tuned guitar, but gimme a break. All eyes were on the pentagram-domed front thing. With stuffed shorts. Dancing. They passed out comic books before the show, explaining their origin and what not, but does it matter? It made about as much sense as any Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. That was the best picture I could get, because despite having such outlandish costumes, they preferred it covered in fog.

Then we had blessed sleep. We had to be at the fest at Hadad’s dirty grungy ’70s style water resort fucking early.

I’m not sure what Sean is pointing at. I’ve never heard of ’em. That’s my story, and I’m kind of sticking to it.

The first band of note was The Burial, Jameson aka Beefcake the Mighty’s pop-punk band. They put on a good performance early in the day and were really the first guys to get the ball rolling. I was really excited to see GWAR spew-tech, our heavy metal maniac, and good friend Germ get on stage and play some damn guit-fiddle. It was weird seeing him on stage and NOT getting beat up by a robot, but he nailed it.

There was some weird noiseness with Mutawawa, but more exciting for me was Antietam 1862. They brought forth the Norwegian style black metal but with an American southern bent. Not in they music, per se, but Antietam is a reference to the bloodiest single battle in American history. More Americans dead than even at Normandy. It was nice to see the corpse paint, wizards, and Norsk shit put aside for a mo’.

At some point around this time, GWAR was doing a meet and greet with the fans. Drummer Jizmak da Gusha apparently, as recounted to me by Beefcake the Mighty, pissed into a water bottle and told anyone who’d swill some that they’d get free beer all day. Three people partook. I’m SO SAD I missed this, said with all due sarcasm. Seriously, GWAR fans… they are another breed. Half.

The fest really picked up as the sun came out. The tigers were having a blast in the water park, disgusting as the water was.

This was a man made lake. The water looked fairly nasty, especially if you count these two fools were jumping in. Our boy Scott and Steve of Whorechurch make quite the strapping pair.

We had our set time, and it was a blast. There was a late start, with some confusion as to why there were no guitar heads on stage. Luckily, we were saved by Antietam 1862. We still had to cut a song to keep our set on time. Unfortunately, no one had told Scott, and I had to yell at him while playing to get his next costume on as he sat comfortably smoking a cigarette. He thought I needed a towel. Please, that’s why God invented sleeves.

We got a lot of grief previously for ripping up a baby on stage (spoiler: it was a toy doll). This time, we smashed a box of kittens (spoiler: some fake fur and blood bags). GWAR has really helped us a lot to become the complete crowd mocking, repugnant assholes that we were meant to be.

Sadly, I missed our friends in Occultist who we’d toured with as we cleaned up our mess. The next band I got to see was our friends from Portland, Murderess. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them all day.

When they started playing clad in bikinis and booty shorts,, it was clear that the crowd didn’t wanna take them seriously. As the first notes started chugging, and that PDX crust-death-punk started blowing eardrums, however, it was a different story. Murderess charged forth and literally had tigers hanging from the rafters air-moshing. They rule. Murderess, I mean. The dudes in the rafters were complete retards.

I had a bit of damper in the day when our new shirts arrived. It’s the old Splatterthrash design, but I had personally redone the separations myself for a new company. And they didn’t look good. Dino smirked at the travesty. I was a bit hurt and disappointed in myself. I was planning a blog post on how to do shirt separations, but alas, I have to go back to the drawing board. We must accept our failures and trudge onwards, otherwise we never get better. Or, just fucking give up. Washed out and crap. These suck, Ross.

After the Casualties and Valiant Thorr, the crowd wanted one thing… GWAR.

The chant was rising forth like bubbling spew from the tip of a cuttlefish. We’d seen a lot of shows touring with GWAR, but this one was special, especially for a dyed-in-the-wool old bohab like myself. The festivities were started off by the main man himself, Mr. Sleazy P. Martini. The nowadays rare appearance of GWAR’s manager is a sure sign that a carnival of chaos is headed your way.

The hits didn’t end with Slaughterama, either… it went double old school with the appearance of Sexicutioner doing his own signature song. I haven’t seen this guy join his fellow scumdogs on stage since the nineties, for fuck’s sake.

It was an amazing performance from GWAR, as always, but with a little more. I’m glad GWAR has evolved to the more tightly honed metal machine they are these days. A little bit of the TSR playing little kid in me, though, misses the old chaos: WAY too many people on stage flopping about like a bunch of half-retarded LARPers.

As with all GWAR shows, the paramedics were helping out a tiger at the end of the show, trying to figure out which blood was real and which was fake. I myself, was exhausted. Sun baked and still jet lagged, we headed out from Hadad’s, a lot of hugs to our benefactors and brethren in GWAR. This was it! The real end! Until the next time…

Some of our camp headed out to the after show back at Strange Matter to see the amazing Ratface from Pittsburgh. I’m sad I missed it, but dammit all, I was tired. I stayed in with our boy Jim and watched some movies while eating garbage and cursing our 6AM flight home.

It was a crazy weekend and the most excellent wrap up for a year with GWAR. We saw the first and last show of this tour cycle. We shared the best of times, we shared the worst of times. These boys were always in my heart as a fan, and now they’re in my heart as friends… or fiends. I can’t decide which.

photo by Glenn Cocoa

Much love… right to the balls.

It’s not often our band is known for doing something nice. In light of the tragedy that befell our local music community, how could we do otherwise? Last Friday, we played one of many benefit shows that have been organized for our fallen comrade, Jef Leppard, and for his recuperating, beloved wife, Nikki.

written about before that I restored, but in great condition. After the show we spoke about how he wasn’t too happy with his tone. He had an Ampeg SVT-4Pro to match the cab. I explained how he could bi-amp the set up to achieve a fuller sound. The SVT-4Pro has correspondingly named speaker outs to match the two sections of speakers in the 1540HE cabinet. With two speaker cables, the lows can be sent to the 15″ speaker and the highs to the four 10″s and dialed in to match dB levels. I know it’s the propensity of men to charge forward without reading instructions, especially musicians, but sometimes it pays to go over the literature. I’ll be curious to see how it works for him the next time I see them play.  Our set was… well, it was fucking chaos. It’s cute when a couple security guards on stage sit on the sides while I’m forced to push people off the stage, bass in hand. Ah well… those tigers really just hate the fuck out of Sean’s mic stand. They want it DESTROYED. I would like to advise folks who want to jump on stage with us and actually grab a microphone: please learn the lyrics. It’s really embarrassing for all involved when you just scream incoherently along with the beat. On me and Sean’s side of the stage, there was a piece of shit power strip plugged into an extension cord. That was power for our amps. Oi vey, I had no idea the problems it would cause. Sean sounded like he was coming out of a Marshall 900, sans gain, and I was losing a lot of oomph while my power light flickered. That power strip was more like a weakness strip. I was worried about our gear. Autopsy was borrowing this stuff, sight unseen, for their headlining stint. After we played, I had the club switch to a more robust power strip and the problem was solved. That’s just one more thing for the pre-show checklist, I guess. I first remember seeing these Autopsy when I was a scared young teenager going to death metal shows. I had few friends. I remember seeing Chris covered in green slime. I thought that was so fucking cool. Obviously. What an impact those shows had. And what an impact this one had. Holy fuck balls, they are still so good. And they sounded great on our shit, if I do say so myself. And I think I just did. Autopsy was a great kicker to what was an awesome and fulfilling evening. Even after the show was over, poor Aimee was still giving away prizes to the peeps who bought raffle tickets. Madness! I imagine the show was an extremely successful benefit, but little can defray the loss and suffering… My one, my biggest piece of advice I can give here is to remember the loved ones around you. Give a hug, hold tight, give a kiss (if appropriate, natch). It’s easy to forget in the humdrum day-to-day bullshit. All the folks who came out this night remembered to show the love… just like Nikki and Jef always did. Nikki is still recovering and her medical costs will be enormous. So much has been done, but every little bit helps. If you haven’t been able to, and can, please try and give so that her hard road to hoe is just a little bit less hard. You can donate here: Nikki Davis – Caring Bridge Page Ghoulection 2012: Transmission Eleven 2012/07/202013/07/16 Doktor Ross Sewage9 Comments It had been almost five weeks since the end of our headlining tour. I swear, it felt like I had concrete shoes, lugging all that shit out of our practice place and back into the trailer. What the fuck? Is five weeks really that long? We was outta god damn shape. Did we really have to do this again? The metal gods commanded we play festivals in Portland and then San Francisco, and we obeyed! Ja wohl! That was at our friend’s house, Emily of Ashland. She’s an insanely good tattoo artist and makes these detailed masks by reconstituting the paper of a wasp’s nest as a kind of papier-mâiché. Kinda makes throwing some latex over foam to make a robot seem trite, in comparison.  We decided to ask Emily if we could stay at her place the day before we’d play, and break up our drive to Portland into two days. That stretch of Highway 5 from the Bay Area to PDX just isn’t worth taking all the way overnight. It’s too long and too much bad mojo on that road. You can’t pass a landmark like “Jump Off Joe Creek” and not think bad thoughts. Anyway, Emily was kind and let us check out some of her awesome art, make some breakfast, and shoot arrows in her backyard. This delightful guy was lucky to be out front. He was left bereft of arrows. We arrived in Portland a bit earlier than necessary. Our name was in lights! We got billed above karaoke… for once.  How perfectly appropriate we would be playing on Friday the 13th… KnowhutImean?  Revelations of Death was a two day fest at the Hawthorne Theater. Long time promoter and new club owner Mike Thrasher asked our old friend Jozy of Murderess to take up the reigns of booking again. She got us and Autopsy to headline the two day extravaganza. Sadly, we couldn’t stay the second day for Autopsy, Murderess and the rest, but thumbs up to our pal Jozy for getting us up here, again!  Those fucking five weeks before this had really made us lazy. Our friends in Weregoat, who were also playing, offered to lend us some cabs. At the time, I thought it was a great idea. When we arrived early and were staging items, like our amps, I immediately regretted it. Here we were, headlining, but we’re too fucking lazy to bring our own shit? I started stressing out. We have enough to do before we start playing, let alone plugging in amps and shit. Eventually, we opted to split the one guitar stack we brought so Sean and Dan could plug in, and I just had to wait. And play a cabinet that was decidedly un-Ampeg. Sad (it turned out fine). Next time, we’re bringing everything just so I can have some piece of mind.  I love when six bands all set up, one in front of the other, and it looks like a god damned NAMM showcase.  There wasn’t a lot of people when the fest started. Was it the early start time? What? I don’t know, but I much enjoyed the first band. Lord Dying was great. C’mon, folks, some times ya need to show up early, dammit.  Next up was our buds in Weregoat. Not only are they face-smashing old-skool black metallers, but also quite the carpenters, too. Kevin showed me the lovely joints they’d fashioned for their decidedly evil looking microphone posts. Sometimes it takes order to create chaos.  And Weregoat are quite the fashionistas, too. Just check out Kevin’s tres chic mink stole!  Next up was the tour package of Speed Wolf and Witchaven. I’ve enjoyed both of these bands many times before and I did again this night. Speed Wolf brought the yummy meat and potatoes metal while Witchaven nailed the thrash to the wall.  Right before us were the actual old schoolers, PDX’s own Wehrmacht. They blasted through a classic sounding set, but not without plenty of reminiscing ala a 27th year high school reunion. I couldn’t help but notice the fancy dancy custom gear. This weird plexi Fender mod with custom blue LEDs was the first thing I saw, then the cabs with switching blue LEDs. What says old school more than flashing LEDs?  Before we went on, I felt like I’d lost my sea legs a bit. I barely knew how to set up. But once we came out, it all fell into place. Well, mostly Sean’s mic stand fell… into the crowd. I think they musta hated Sean’s vocals, because all the people attempting stage dives decided to take Sean’s microphone down with ’em.  We called a “girls only” stage dive song, and that was awesome. Apparently, the ladies like to do it in pairs. Moral support? The guys thought they could take on our robot. Seriously, though… leave the robot the fuck alone. I’m sick of having to ACTUALLY hit you. It’s a show, folks, and while we appreciate lots of enthusiasm, the show is FOR you, not WITH you. Leave the poor man behind the curtain alone. He’s fucking TIRED. The next day, we made food errands, because we is fat kids. Portland, while being short on people who are non-young, non-white, and non-hip, is plentiful with the good food stuffs. First stop was Voodoo Donuts… the second location, ’cause fuck the tourists. A dozen wasn’t enough. We needed two.  Next stop, the weird-o vegan health food store that allows us to buy cases of this. That’s just the way it is in Portland; we have turn up the ends of our mustachioes, roll up our pant leg, and be ironic just to get some of my favorite hot sauce. Why the fuck isn’t this amazing shit just at Safeways everywhere for everyone to enjoy, dammit?!? On Saturday the fourteenth, we headed back to San Francisco. The next day, we were participating in the second day of the Tidal Wave festival, a tradition in it’s 13th year. Was 13 becoming a theme? Well, it must be good luck, or something, because we had a blast.  Early in the day, there weren’t that many folks about, but that’s because it was god damned 11:30 AM! It filled up later, but I couldn’t tell ya how many. We were given excellent beer from Prohibition Brewery, a local SF joint that’s just a bit over the top in regards to alcohol content. My senses were altered. Yum.  Tidal Wave is like a stay-cation in the city. It’s free, ya bring your own booze, and a mass of metal heads eventually congregate, eating and drinking merrily. The sounds of real heavy metal like Slough Feg hits your eardrums. Or these, guys, Haunted by Heroes… seriously, these little dudes are like 11 years old each and they ruled it. It makes me want to steal their lunch money and break their stupid, talented fingers.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDG3tKMv25U?version=3] Christy and friends in Beercraft were actually sober when they hit the stage early on and set the tone for all the day’s revelry. They jammed some folk metal dedicated to (what else) beer. Gravehill came up from L.A. to fill the quotient of Satanism required at any metal show. The Lord Weird Slough Feg did what they always do… jam it the fuck out and rule. They even have costume changes. Yeah, that’s metal as fuck.  Before we went on, the promoter Tonus had us a sign a seven-string guitar they’d been donated for a raffle. Sean signed it, “Guitar has too many strings: Defective – Return”  And then we went on at the earliest hour that Dan, Dino, Sean and me have ever made it onto stage together. Or at least, it was the most daylight we’d all seen. We jammed it out it out while the local park constabulary, or “nature pig,” as I like to call them, looked on at us… aghast. And that’s how ya do it. Piss off the old people. Oh wait… we are the old people. Well, that’s what the masks hide. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMUQOwsG0Kk] It was another good weekend with the boys, but that was it for now. I forgot how much shit we had and kept in the trailer, as I unpacked and watched our once mighty loft bow under all the weight. Fucking christ. Please, someone call Hoarders and let us please play in a normal band where I’m not stained red at the end of the night!  Nah, fuck it. It’s too much fun.